The Haworth Cemetery
The House of Dead Maids by Clare B. Dunkle. New York: Henry Holt, 2010.

The Haworth cemetery is only a few feet from the house where the Brontës lived.

As you can tell from this headstone, the graves were reopened to admit new family members, and the new names and dates were added below the old ones. The Brontës could hear the endless tapping of stonecutters working on the headstones from morning till night.

The Haworth cemetery is the graveyard Tabby refers to at the end of the book.

Patrick Brontë had the trees planted to aid Haworth's sanitation; this crowded graveyard is on top of the highest point in town, and its corpses were fouling the groundwater. When Tabby came to work for the Brontës, there were no trees.

The wonderful English moss almost seems to glow on a gloomy day.

I love the mist. This was the middle of the day, and the middle of May, too (around the same time as Tabby's adventure).

All photographs copyright 2009 by Joseph R. Dunkle